UK watchdog orders ringfencing of Britain's Big Four audit business

Britain's business minister Greg Clark has said he would legislate to implement the Competition and Markets Authority's recommendations

Britain’s Big Four accounting firms must ringfence auditing from their consultancy work, the country’s competition watchdog said on Thursday in a response to book-keeping failures such as at construction company Carillion and retailer BHS.

“Auditors should focus exclusively on producing the most challenging and objective audits, rather than being influenced by their much larger consultancy businesses,” the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said.

Exemplifying the issue, regulators found PwC’s lead auditor of BHS spent two hours on its 2014 audit and 31 hours on more lucrative non-audit work, leaving the bulk of auditing work to juniors. PwC was fined a